4 minute read
Mise en Place
Mise en Place
HIGH HOPES OWNER JAMIE HOWARD LIGHTS UP ABOUT MELTING MOUTHS WITH THOUGHTFUL ICE CREAM FLAVORS
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By Kate Frick
The High Hopes window is a friendly, walkup portal to transcendent ice cream flavors. The employee-only interior is adorned with drippy psychedelic ice cream art with melting cat-ice-cream-faces. The menu items read like cannabis strains: Banana Haze, Mother Earth, Monster High, Modest Mallow, Malted-Candy-Cap Mushroom. Jamie Howard, a master of her craft, avoids glowing online reviews to maintain her modesty.
How did you get into ice cream?
I’ve done pastry. I’ve done the hotline. I worked at Rieger [and Blackhole Bakery] for a while. I finally got an ice cream gig, and I was like, “This is what I’m going to do when I grow up.” The very first ice cream that I made was at Betty Rae’s. I was the kitchen manager for almost three years, but I knew I wanted to open my own shop.
When we first opened, I wanted to reserve [Strawberry Birthday Cake] for the shop’s birthday, but then I took it off the menu, and people online were really upset with me, so I put it back. Almost everything here is colored with beetroot powder, turmeric, matcha, and spirulina—except Birthday Cake. It has to have the Jell-O for that nostalgic flavor.
Between industry jobs and parenting, how did you manifest High Hopes?
I started collecting a bunch of used equipment. I didn’t really have the means to start it, but I already had all this stuff. I impulsively bought this ice cream machine on eBay at, like, 3 a.m. It was really affordable [about nine grand for this used machine all the way from New York], and I had it shipped here, and it sat in my living room for a year. It was very nice, but the most expensive bookshelf I’ve ever had in my life. Every day I would walk by and be like, “You’re still not making ice cream.” That was another motive.
On your whiteboard, it says: “High Hopes, even lower expectations.” is that a life motto or a business motto?
The guy who did most of the plumbing and stuff in here wrote that. He’s gonna do some coloring pages for me. He’s hilarious.
How do you feel about ice cream for the munchies?
A lot of people come up and say, “Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s on the cusp of cannabis. You know, it doesn’t fuel creativity, but it certainly opens the gate. The name came from cannabis. We were going to be a cannabis ice cream shop, but I didn’t have the licensing and money for it. The regulations for medical marijuana excluded ice cream, specifically because of its appeal to children. I’m hoping that one day maybe a local farmer will approach me and say, “Hey, we love your ice cream, and we want to put our cannabis in it.” And then a relationship can kind of start from there. I kept the name in the hopes of it growing into something a lot bigger.
Photo by Steph Castor
You’re baking most of the ingredients and making all the ice cream. What’s a regular work week for you?
A lot of nights. It kind of balances out with how my children go to school, and Jonathan (my fiancé) recently came on full-time, so we can work the shop together. I’m teaching him, and he just came out with his own flavor. Very much a bartender flavor: a grapefruit shrub turned into a sorbet. I would put it with some champagne.
What flavor combination is hitting all the marks?
The campfire s’mores, with smoked cinnamon sticks and dried vanilla beans to get that campfire punch. It took a while for me to put this on the menu because I didn’t want people to get used to something that was basic.
